By Muriel Pilkington. The local voice
L
ooking over my columns the other day, I realised I’ve written a lot about the Civil War, the Transition, Franco, King Juan Carlos and Zapatero, but little about the dictatorship itself. I know how interested most EU expats are in the war so here’s hoping they’re just as interested in knowing more about the 36 long years of the Franco dictatorship, because that’s what I’ll be writing about over the next few weeks. When I can leave Zapatero alone, that is.
Franco did many bad things but he also did some good. And here Mark Antony’s words about Caesar are very apt – the evil that men do lives on, the good is oft interred with their bones. A short while ago, one of Franco’s grandsons said he couldn’t understand the current demonising of his grandfather, when he had done so much good – building roads and railways, among other things. No doubt the Republicans would have done the same if they’d won the war – and they would probably have killed off their enemies just as Franco did – but that’s another story.
But where to turn to find reliable facts and figures about the Franco years in these days of ultra-political correctness and the Historical Memory Law, which has led to the discovery of more and more mass graves of the people he executed during and after the war? However, just to show how one-sided the “dignifying of Franco's victims” is, a few months ago the bones of some 20-odd Republican soldiers were dug up in the region where the battle of the Ebro took place.
They were reverentially unearthed – until it was discovered that about half of them were wearing Franco uniforms. All the bones – including the Republican ones – were promptly abandoned in boxes in an unused church. The mayor of the town demanded their removal or he “would put them back in the earth whence they came”. Moral of the story – some bones are more deserving of our reverence than others.
It was the pro-government newspaper, El Pais, which came to my rescue. It’s running a series of stories on pro-Franco writers and historians entitled “Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. This past Sunday, the subject was controversial historian Pio Moa, loathed by the Left because he insists it was the left-wing politicians of the Second Republic that brought on the war, with their insistence on revolution rather than reform – which frightened the Right into action.
On one anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Moa wrote: “Today is July 18th, the anniversary of the legitimate uprising against an illegitimate government-regime …. which led to the longest period of peace that Spain has lived for many centuries, also the greatest prosperity, the abandoning of old hatreds and, in short, democracy.”
On digging up Franco’s victims, he wrote: “One of the most outrageous lies of the enemies of justice and democracy disguised today as anti-Francoists is precisely their invocation of ‘the dignity of the victims of Franco’.” But who were those victims? Among those shot and imprisoned by the Franco regime there was a high number of Chekists (Republican political police named after the forerunner of the KGB) and the perpetrators of really sadistic crimes, hired assassins abandoned by their masters who had fled abroad with huge amounts of treasure stolen from the Spanish people.
After accusing the Socialists of using dirty tricks to win the 2004 general election (manipulating the Madrid train bombings to bring out the anti-war faction), he later wrote: “Since 2004, we have had a mafioso government, that is, illegal and immoral, violator of the Constitution, ally of terrorists (ETA), separatists, totalitarian regimes like Cuba or threatening tyrannies like Morocco, underminer of the legal system and the family, promoter of all forms of corruption, proclaiming itself the true heir of the ‘red’ Popular Front which caused the Civil War.
The El Pais article told me something I didn’t know about Pio Moa – in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a radical opponent of the Franco regime, not just in words but in deeds. He risked jail by joining the banned Spanish Communist Party. And he risked his life when he later joined the Maoist terrorist organisation, GRAPO. He recalled this period of his life in “About a Time and a Country: The Violent Left”. After the transition to democracy, Moa’s political opinions became increasingly conservative.
Knowing how much left-wing historians, including one of my favourites, Paul Preston, hated him, I was surprised to find that Stanley G Payne, an American historian and expert on Fascism who is much respected in his field, has praised Moa for daring to speak up about a period of Spanish history that is taboo today, and for criticising those who are doing their best to sweep lots of unpalatable truths under the carpet.
I will let Mr Payne explain his reasons as only he can do in my next column.
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